More of this Feature • Old-Skool and New Media • Chapbooks and Zines • Conclusions and Zine-Friendly Bookstores

The promise (or threat, depending on how you look at it) of literature on the Internet in the last several years has centered around the idea of “electronic books,” actual literary collections that are presented, sold, bought and traded on the Web in digital form. While the technology for presenting the texts themselves has been steadily improving, a realistic form of actually taking the “e-books” and reading them on the go has sadly not yet quite come to fruition.

But in the rapidly changing culture we live in, these options are expanding on a monthly basis. Palm Pilots, for example, once the exclusive domain of overpaid yuppies with too much time on their hands, have suddenly become egalitarian with the recent slash in prices. (Now that 3Com is pushing the new “wireless Internet” Palm VII, brand-new Palm III’s are going for $150 until they can get rid of them all. And hell, even artists can afford that.) As portable devices such as these and the myriad of Windows CE-compatible machines slowly make their way into the general public’s hands, dissemination of literature in electronic form becomes more real.

There are currently two realistic ways of presenting your poetry in electronic form, for contemplation and enjoyment on handheld devices. Both have their individual benefits and drawbacks, and the two work in radically different ways, not only from traditional paper books but from each other as well.

E-BOOKS
The most common way currently for writers to present their work electronically is to take the entire document and convert it to a portable-friendly format. In the case of Palms (a personal bias of mine, in that I own one), this means presenting your document in a format entitled “.prc.” You can think of .prc as a portable version of “.txt,” or the ASCII-friendly, non-formatted version of typed documents. Both the .prc and .txt versions of literary documents are elegantly applicable over a wide range of devices. By eschewing such proprietary settings as italics, tables and margins, the documents become universally acceptable on devices ranging from a $5,000 screaming-fast PC all the way to a beat-up Macintosh Classic you picked up for five bucks at the Salvation Army. (The admirable Project Gutenberg, for example, whose goal is no less than the electronic offering of every public-domain book ever written in human history, works exclusively in .txt format.)

AVANTGO
AvantGo is one of a number of new sites dedicated to providing actual Web content to handheld devices. People become free “subscribers” to the service, receiving a piece of proprietary software that runs on their desktop. AvantGo keeps a list of several thousand “channels,” which are in actuality Palm and CE-friendly versions of such popular Web sites as Salon, the New York Times, MapQuest and the like. After choosing which channels a subscriber would like to receive (again for free), each portable synchronization with their desktop computer will launch that proprietary software. The software connects to the AvantGo server through your normal desktop Internet connection, which will then go to the Web site you've selected, suck in the information, and push it back through to your portable device. You unhook your Palm, stick it in your pocket, and suddenly have anywhere from 10 to 200 pages of web content ready to read no matter where you go. (The Palm VII version of this software is even more impressive, allowing Palm owners to literally have live Web access on a 24/7 basis.)

The thing that many writers don’t realize about AvantGo is that becoming an official “channel” with the site is free and easy to do. AvantGo makes their money from selling advertising, so they are more than happy to add any person who wishes to take the time to program a regularly-updated Palm-friendly version of their Web site. This includes myself, and the Palm-friendly version of my site is officially going “live” the same day I’m writing this article.

HOW IT WORKS
In the case of e-books, numerous programs exist all over the Web for converting your existing documents into .prc form. Some are free while others cost a minimum amount; some are very good while others are not quite so hot; some are stand-alone programs that do nothing but the conversion, while others are in actuality macros that work with existing applications like Word and WordPerfect. To find the wide range of programs available, it is easiest to go to freeware-heavy places such as Palm’s own support site, which usually put all the converter information together on one page along with customer comments and the record of downloads. You can also have luck by going to a search engine and typing in such terms as “prc,” “doc to prc,” “text to prc,” “electronic text,” “e-book creation,” and the like. Once you convert the e-book you’d like people to read, there are several places in which to offer the book itself. You can leave the book on your personal Web site, with a link to it from one of your pages. (Like any other non-HTML document at a website, clicking on the link will signal to that person’s computer to download the document to the hard drive. PDA owners then transfer the book to their Palm or other device themselves, an easy process.) You can also offer the book at the same freeware Web sites where you found the converter in the first place -- many of these places have entire sections devoted to electronic books, and the number of amateur writers at these places is sometimes astounding. Other options include selling the e-book through a legitimate Web retailer, converting the first chapter of a paper book as a “teaser” to get people to purchase, or starting your own online literary journal devoted to the collection of e-books worldwide.

Becoming a channel with AvantGo is an easy but long process. Go to their Web site and look at the information about becoming a content partner. The entire process is free and the staff of AvantGo has been nothing but helpful to me, but I can’t make any personal guarantee that they will accept your channel proposal. As far as actually programming the pages that will be loaded to people’s devices each day, the process is remarkably simple and can be executed by any person with even a minimum knowledge of HTML. (AvantGo provides their own well-written and extremely useful development guide at their site, which walks you through the entire process of creating your own PDA-friendly space…or as I’ve been calling them, “Palmsites.”) The only technical requirement is that the pages actually sit on a Web server somewhere on the Internet, just like any other Web site that exists. There are dozens of places around the Web that provide free server space for users; look casually through search engines for more details.

BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS
The biggest benefit to both e-books and AvantGo, in my opinion, is that these are aimed at an untapped audience right now. When I go live with my AvantGo channel, I will literally be the only writer on the entire planet offering my creative work to the millions of dedicated subscribers of the service. Oftentimes at freeware sites there will be only five to ten actual contemporary works being offered electronically, the rest consisting of public domain stories such as the Bible and the work of Mark Twain. As portable devices become even cheaper over time and their use more prevalent across social and financial spheres, this topic will become of even greater relevance. Why not get in on the ground floor now, when you have little to no competition for audience members? It’s as if you had started a Web site in 1991 -- your readers are captive because they have no one else to read.

Both processes also exist as a way of disseminating your work at almost no cost whatsoever. While xeroxing and mailing my chapbooks cost $1.35 per reader, my e-books can be downloaded and read by 50,000, 100,000, a million people at absolutely no cost to me: I receive my Web space free from Geocities, my Internet access free through work, and the converter was a piece of freeware I downloaded one day. The Internet presents a truly profound opportunity for artists -- a chance to provide your work to a global audience, no matter how poor you are personally, in a format that looks just as professional no matter if it’s you alone or a team of 100 staff members at HarperCollins presenting it.

The biggest drawback can be potentially trivial or life-threatening, depending on what kind of person you are. The basic principle is that you’re not receiving any money directly in exchange for your electronic readership. You can choose to look at this in one of two ways: either you trust in the idea of a free-market society and realize that unpaid electronic access to your work will help sales of the printed versions; or you remain wary of a free-market society and legitimately worry that people will not buy your work when they can get it for free on the Web. I personally think both opinions are valid, although admittedly my authorship of this article reveals my personal decision on the matter.

Jason Pettus

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